At Home and at the Doctor: A Health Blog

18 May 2020

Who Is Eligible For Interventional Injections For Pain?

Living with chronic pain turns your world upside down. Life as you used to know it is forever changed in an effort even just to mitigate the pain so you can go about your day-to-day tasks. Pain management experts are constantly searching for new methods and treatments for helping their patients mitigate and even eliminate chronic pain.

One treatment method is an interventional injection. Interventional injections can be used to both treat and diagnose chronic pain. Though the types of treatments vary, the injections typically involved some type of nerve blocker, steroid, or opioid. The treatment is injected at the site of pain to help relieve pain or diagnose the cause of it.

For example, epidural steroid injections involve the injection of steroids directly into the lumbar spine in order to treat the inflamed nerve. On the other hand, an injection intended to trigger pain may help diagnose problems in the SIJ or sacroiliac intra-articular joint. But some might wonder who is eligible, or more specifically, when should interventional injections be a pain management option for chronic pain sufferers?

Post-Surgery Chronic Pain

Interventional injections are often used to treat patients who have already undergone surgery and are still experiencing chronic pain. Once a patient has gone through conventional therapies and surgery to try to correct the problem, and once the patient has experienced a reasonable recovery period, sometimes the pain still won't be eliminated. There are several reasons why this might occur including scar tissue at the surgery site, development of new pain generators, or previous nerve damage. Interventional injections may help ease pain or help diagnose more accurately post-surgery.

Ineligible for Surgery

Interventional injections are also a great option for chronic pain sufferers who have undergone traditional therapies, but who are not eligible for surgical procedures. Their ineligibility may be because of poor health or other mitigating health factors, but if this is the case, the pain still needs to be addressed. Injections can help someone who is unable to explore the surgical option.

Severe Pain

Interventional injections may also be necessary for a chronic pain sufferer whose pain is so severe they are unable to perform traditional physical therapy or at-home exercises designed to help with the pain. In these instances, injections may be the only option for pain relief. This type of severe pain and limited mobility is common for people with disorders of the musculoskeletal system or the spine.

For more information on interventional injection, reach out to someone like Joel D Stein DO PA.

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About Me

Most people, when they think about health, picture a doctor's office. Indeed, your doctor is a key contributor to your health. They check your vital signs, prescribe medicine when necessary, and can even send you for surgery when a more serious ailment arises. But health care does not just take place in the doctor's office. It's all-encompassing. What you do at home matters; how much exercise you get, what you eat, and how well you sleep all have a huge impact on your health. If you are interesting in learning more about health from an array of perspectives, check out the articles on this blog.